Do our pets really love us?

Life Pets & Domestic Animals
1

From one of my mailing lists, seems appropiate for this month:

[quote]So the real question is… do our pets really “love” us, as we understand it?

My opinion is yes! To support my opinion, we asked Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a well-known behaviorist and professor at Tufts University College of Veterinary Medicine, the same question. Dr. Dodman says… in response to Do our pets really love us? says…

"In a word, the answer is yes, according to clinical evidence. Food does play a large role in feelings of affection between pet and owner. But cats do not live by treat and food alone - and neither does a cat’s affection depend solely on treats. The mere presence and/or touch of a preferred person have been shown to reduce the heart rate of these animals - a sign of bonding.

Cats are said to be independent, aloof, and not in need of company except on their terms. This is true only of some cats; certainly not all. Cats raised by people from an early age either think they are almost human, or that the human is almost a cat.

In fact, throughout a cat-person bond, the two may switch roles without realizing it. On occasion, a cat will bring home a dead or half-dead animal as a token of her love and respect (a touching, if gruesome, method of confirming the bond).

Bringing home “love offerings” of this type is a sign of attachment and belonging. There are others that require less clean up. When the bond is strong, a cat will:

  • Tend to follow you around. She may not follow immediately, but after a moment or two she might casually saunter into the room where you’re sitting (as if she’s trying to play the whole thing down). Your cat may jump in your lap or may just find a chair nearby. Either way, she prefers to spend time with you.

  • Become slightly depressed when you leave, and greet you enthusiastically upon your return. She may learn to recognize the sound of your car pulling up and run to the door, expecting your presence.

  • Send subtle cat signals of affection to you throughout the day. These often take the form of classic “cat kisses” - staring at you adoringly, then squinting or slowly closing her eyes.

  • Send not-so-subtle signals, such as rubbing her head upon you (marking you with her scent), and of course, purring.

  • Lying on her back, with her stomach exposed. This is a sign of trust, because your cat is now in a vulnerable position. Many owners mistakenly think this is a request for a belly rub. It usually isn’t.

This is a cat’s affection at its most intense. They can’t hold your hand, and they are not given to jumping up and kissing you. There’s no difficulty to describe this sort of relationship as love."
[/quote]

My cats used to put cat food bits into my boots…so I wouldn’t be hungry at work. :s What do your pets do for you?

2

Mine greet me at the door every time I come home. My Ping Ping lies on his back all the time doing various yoga positions. He loves spending time around me though is not big on sitting on my lap. He prefers to play rough, which involves boxing, and biting, and getting pushed on his back across the floor and being spun around. Yes, he loves these things as after I push him across the floor for example he runs back for another push.

Lots of kisses from both cats and rubs.

These days I am training Ping to lie across my shoulders like a little lamb while I hold his feet.

3

Eating my socks …

4

Our cat ate four daffodils yesterday then threw them up on my 10000NT shoes.

Fear and avoidance is the emotion I’m aiming for.

5

Cats eat grass and such when they want to throw up to clear hair in their throat. It’s a natural instinct. Give your cat catnip once a week or so to help the process. And be on the lokout afterwards. Cats are usually pretty good at making loud hackign sounds for a minute or so before they puke.

And honestly you have to accept that pets are going to ruin things on occassion. My cats destroyed a painted emu egg that my Australian uncle sent as a wedding gift. There are only a few of the real aboriginal carvers left who still do the traditional style of painting by scraping off layers of eggshell to get the colors they want. This egg was done by one of these guys as a favor to my uncle who had been his boxing coach when he was younger. That was worth a whole lot more than NT10,000. :frowning:

6

[quote=“Muzha Man”]Cats eat grass and such when they want to throw up to clear hair in their throat. It’s a natural instinct. Give your cat catnip once a week or so to help the process. And be on the lokout afterwards. Cats are usually pretty good at making loud hackign sounds for a minute or so before they puke.

And honestly you have to accept that pets are going to ruin things on occassion. My cats destroyed a painted emu egg that my Australian uncle sent as a wedding gift. There are only a few of the real aboriginal carvers left who still do the traditional style of painting by scraping off layers of eggshell to get the colors they want. This egg was done by one of these guys as a favor to my uncle who had been his boxing coach when he was younger. That was worth a whole lot more than NT10,000. :frowning:[/quote]

This cat eats EVERTHING. Polythene, hair, oats, lego.

Yeah, I have to accept it while I am poor enough to have to be living with my sister’s stinking gross disgusting beasts. I hate animals, especially spiders, frogs, cats and hamsters/gerbils. But I smile and get the anti-bacterial wipes out, after the darling creature took a shit and then went and sat on the hob again. I am a guest, I am a guest, I am a guest.

She even talks to them. Jesus H. One is old and sick and doesn’t move much. We have an understanding. The ‘adolescent’ is really annoying. It jumped in the blender jug while my sister turned her back to grab a pot of yogurt the other day. I was so tempted to make a cat smoothie and blame it on the other cat/an electrical fault. And my sister thinks I’m uptight for soaking the jug in bleach!

7

Mucha Man: your cats really love you indeed :laughing:

Belgian Pie: at least they eat them. One of my cats has a “loving” relationship with my socks -clean ones only, mind you. He also “does” towellettes, bras, scarfs, and any piece of clothing small enough so he can drag it around and … you know.

I was told it is “normal behavior”. :astonished:

Buttercup: I feel your pain. As a rule, I keep my shoes in their original boxes. My cats -in spite of having several expensive scratching posts- still prefer my slippers and shoes for this task. All my closets and cabinets have child-proof locks. And still…

They love to pee on my conforter. They have
five
litter boxes, and they rather do it there.

I love my pets, and they love me, too.

Sigh

8

okay, each cat has a different way of showing love:

Wa (the oldest and the queen of the house) likes to lay on my pillow and lick my hair. She guards my pillow from all the other cats and will go in to the bedroom early just to warm up my pillow on a chilly night. Besides that, she’s not reallly affectionate. She only likes her forehead rubbed.

D2 is my sweet boy. He never leaves my side. If I’m sitting at the computer desk, he has a chair next to me. If I’m on the sofa, he sits next to me. Sometimes when I lay down, he will jump on top of me and “massage” my chest and purr.

Orin G. is nicknamed “the purr machine”. I just pick him up and say “on”, then he starts purring really loudly. Good for an upset stomach! He’s also "big brother to the other 4 girls.

Mary is deaf and has an amazingly loud voice. Sometimes I think the neighbors might complain. She will come running into the room or up to me and meow really loud… that’s the sign that she wants to play. She likes to spin on the desk chair.

Connie is Mary’s wild sister who lives in my house but is not domesticated. She just stares at me and sometimes she will play with my feet when I sleep.

Nari does not like affection. She likes people, doesn’t mind being held or touched, but you can really tell that she is just not interested in it. She likes to be around me though, always in the same room.

and last… but not least… (weightwise) is Patticake. She’s my teddy bear. Or she can be my scarf, or my furry hat, an extra pillow. If I put her somewhere, she will stay there all day. I can hold her, toss her, roll her like pizza dough and she comes back for more.

So, imagine a night at my house…

9

Yech, these are all CAT stories. :raspberry:

10

I trained my fish to swim through a hoop.

I suspect it was cupboard love rather than genuine intelligence, though. (The fish, not me, he was too small to have made much of a meal)

11

Supposedly, this is all the rage right now in Japan–Dog Yoga. My university chum from Japan and his family (they run a publishing company) were visiting Taiwan during New Years, and his sister seemed very excited about the whole thing.

Pampered Tokyo pups :laughing: :laughing:

12

well i have a ferret and i do think that he loves me, whenever he is out of his home “cage” when i am back from the office he wont stay away from me, he will be on the bed if i am watching TV, he will walk the house when i go somewhere, basically he takes care that he really knows where i am all the time, ones he is sure that i am staying in a place for some time then he will go to play somewhere near and come to check on me from time to time and if i move he will stop what he is doing to check my new spot !!!
and he is still under 1 year or around that, and ferrets are supposed to “mature” after 1.5 years… so i am happy with that…

13

[quote=“Icon”]So the real question is… do our pets really “love” us, as we understand it?

My opinion is yes! To support my opinion, we asked Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a well-known behaviorist and professor at Tufts University College of Veterinary Medicine, the same question. Dr. Dodman says… in response to Do our pets really love us?

“In a word, the answer is yes, according to clinical evidence.”[/quote]

A behaviorist talking about love, let alone saying that pets actually “love” humans??? :noway:

Do pets really “love” us, as we understand it?
No. Love is purely a human emotion. Anyone who says otherwise is living in an anthropomorphically-driven fantasy world. Do they show us affection? Yes. Loyalty? yes. But love? no!

Don’t get me wrong…I love animals, but people project their emotions too easily and the road to becoming a “crazy cat lady” is a slippery slope.

14

Following on from my earlier post, I actually bonded with the kitten and miss him, now that I’ve moved away. He used to make a little nest in my hair to sleep in (gross, I know, but I got used to it…) I even forgave him when hes scratched the **** out of my face, when he got wedged between two slats of the wooden blinds and howled for rescue at 4 am.

I spoke to him on speakerphone last week and he meowed back and tried to lick the phone. My sister says he sat outside my bedroom door and howled for a week, after I left.

15

[quote=“Modest Mouse”]Love is purely a human emotion. Anyone who says otherwise is living in an anthropomorphically-driven fantasy world. Do they show us affection? Yes. Loyalty? yes. But love? no!
[/quote]

How do you know? How do you know that they don’t love us? I recognize that we often go too far in projecting our own feelings onto animals, but I would suggest that you go too far in the opposite direction in denying the possibility that love might be more than purely a human emotion.

Our behaviors which are closely associated with the subjective experience of love, behaviors such as bonding, nurturing, mutual protection and grief, are all behaviors shared by other mammals. And emotions appear related to the limbic system, which is highly developed in mammals.

I don’t think it unreasonable to say that these behaviors such as bonding, nurturing, mutual protection and grief are in fact non-verbal expressions of love. While we cannot know that our pets love us because we cannot ask for a verbal report of their subjective response, we can certainly see that they show the same non-verbal expressions associated with love. Therefore it is not at all unreasonable to infer that they, too, experience the subjective feeling of love. I would not consider that an anthropomorphically-driven fantasy, but a reasonable conclusion based on observation of the behavior of animals, compared with the behavior and associated subjective reports of the love emotion of humans.

16

Someone should ask urodacus. He’d know for shure.

17

Humans don’t love either. It’s just an illusion. People are just linked by smell, a need for food, warmth, etc. just like animals. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, though. It’s just nature.

18

Supposedly, this is all the rage right now in Japan–Dog Yoga. My university chum from Japan and his family (they run a publishing company) were visiting Taiwan during New Years, and his sister seemed very excited about the whole thing.

Pampered Tokyo pups :laughing: :laughing:

[/quote]

I need to move to Japan and just spend the rest of my life coming up of ways to “teach” bored housewives something…

19

Humans coined the term “love” because they could feel it; I’m sure that animals (at least birds and mammals) feel it too; their behaviours, loyalty, and their eyes say so.

I had a cat in university. I also had a fish, named Pisces (pronounced piss-kiss). The cat, Pudd, would sometimes stare at the fish, but had more of an interest in the plastic plant in Pisces’ bowl. Every morning, around 5:30 (Pudd was an early riser), I would get a cold, wet, yucky plastic plant in my face (my mouth if it was open). If I had the foresight to sleep under the covers, Pudd would find me and then present his gift. I also got moths, Q-tips and tampons, carefully removed from the wrappings and carried around by the string.

Pudd cried when I left and ran around like a lunatic when I came home. (People brave enough to spend the night informed me of this). He knew the sound of my car and liked to be cuddled on his back, like a baby. He smelled so nice and clean, and his purr was so quiet, I needed to touch under his chin to see if he was purring. He even came when I called him, even if he couldn’t hear “food”! Sometimes I miss him so much!

Now, he lives with my best friend in Canada. I see him when I go home, and he lets me hold him, but he seems almost hurt. He turns his back to me when I leave. Maybe I’m trying to make him more human than he is, but that’s how it seems. Maybe he would have been better off in Taiwan, in a flat. Guess I’ll never know now…

20

I would take issue, but I get your point, we are animals after all, our brethren the higher animals share many emotions and characteristics with us. Modest Mouse, I don’t know how you can be so sure, we can even have trouble reading the emotions of people from different cultures.